CHAPTER 7
On August 21, 1860, two days after his men were driven back from Shanghai under a storm of grapeshot and canister, Loyal King Li Xiucheng wrote an aggrieved letter to the British and American consuls to complain. “I came to Shanghai to make a treaty in order to see us connected together by trade and commerce,” he wrote to them bitterly. “I did not come for the purpose of fighting with you.” He accused the French of setting a trap. As he told it, some French citizens (along with unspecified others) had come to Suzhou earlier that summer and invited him to come to Shanghai to discuss friendly relations between their countries. “It never occurred to my mind,” he wrote, “that the French, allowing themselves to be deluded by the imperial demons, would break their word and turn their backs on the arrangement made.”1 He was told that the Qing government had given the French a large sum of money to defend Shanghai, and it seemed to him “without doubt” that the money had been “shared amongst the other nations,” as evidenced by the fact that none of the British or American citizens came out to negotiate with him but instead all joined the French in firing cannons from the city walls.
“It is impossible that the affair should be forgotten,” he warned. But he was willing to forgive the British and Americans, because they were his fellow Protestants. As for the treacherous (and idolatrous) French, they were another matter, and he noted that it was just a matter of time until the Taiping controlled all of China, after which a day of reckoning would come. “With human feelings, and in human affairs, all acts have their consequences,” he wrote. “The French have violated their faith, and broken the peace between us.” Out of “magnanimity” he pledged that he personally wouldn’t prevent them from coming into Taiping territory, but he also said that he couldn’t guarantee the complicity of the many officers and soldiers “who have been subjected to their deceit” and were now “filled with indignation, and desirous of revenge.” In conclusion, he swallowed his pride and reiterated that what the Taiping wanted, above all, was a peaceful relationship with their Christian brethren from England and the United States. “You and we alike worship Jesus,” he reminded them. “There exists between us the relationship of a common basis and common doctrines.”
Though Li Xiucheng authored the letter, the sentiment behind it was Hong Rengan’s. For it was Hong Rengan whose strategy for winning the war depended on support from the British and Americans in Shanghai, especially their willingness to sell or lease the rebels steamships to ensure their command of the Yangtze River. As chief of staff and prime minister, Hong Rengan had the approval of his cousin to set the policy that the other kings had to follow. Since he believed firmly that the best hope for the rebels was in building peaceful relations with the foreigners in Shanghai, Li Xiucheng had to toe the line as long as Hong Rengan was prime minister. But he did so only with reluctance. Within the Taiping inner circle, Li Xiucheng disputed Hong Rengan’s trust in the foreigners and took a more aggressive view. “Foreigners like to fight,” he told Hong Rengan. “They don’t like peace.”2
The unexpected outbreak of hostilities at Shanghai had helped make Li Xiucheng’s case and widened the existing rift between him and Hong Rengan. But for his own part, Hong Rengan laid the blame on Li Xiucheng rather than the foreigners. He said that they must have gotten wind of Li’s belligerent views toward them, which would naturally lead them to think he was coming to attack. As Hong Rengan told it, the Loyal King was flush with military strength after sweeping through Jiangsu province and conquering Suzhou, and he treated Shanghai as though it were already in the palm of his hand. The foreigners, playing on his confidence, lured him in with an “empty city strategy”: they led the Loyal King to believe the city was completely undefended and then, when he approached, launched a surprise attack. After the defeat, Li Xiucheng “finally began to see things my way,” Hong believed, “though he wouldn’t admit he had made a mistake.”3 Despite their disagreement on tactics, however, there was no question to either of them that the rebels needed Shanghai: it was rich in financial stores, it was a base from which to acquire foreign weapons, and it was a hive of imperial resistance within a territory otherwise under their control. But it was as yet unattained, and now it was up to Hong Rengan’s diplomacy to bring it under their influence.
In his capacity as head of foreign affairs, Hong Rengan began to hold court in Nanjing, receiving a succession of visitors from Shanghai who brought him news, gifts, and at one point even his family members who had remained in Hong Kong.4 His was one of the larger palaces in the capital, and it served not just as his home but also as the center for his work. Directly across from its front gate, facing the entrance, stood a massive stone tablet, fifteen feet high and ten wide, with an enormous Chinese character for “blessing” carved into it and painted over in gold.5 Above the giant character were inscribed Jesus Christ’s nine beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount, tempered in meaning by their strange new context (none more so than the seventh: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God”). Within lay the main public hall with its throne, where the Shield King held audience, dressed in imperial yellow silk robes, his hair done up with gilted pasteboard in the ornamental style of the old Ming dynasty.6
Beyond the main hall, a warren of dim hallways and doors led into his private quarters deep within the palace, his own room furnished mainly with a large bed decorated in jade and facing out onto a bright courtyard with a garden. Here he surrounded himself with fragmentary talismans of the industrial world abroad, mostly souvenirs from his visitors. In varying degrees of functionality, his shelves held a collection of foreign clocks, a barometer, a telescope, several Colt revolvers, a secondhand harmonium, two solar lamps, a bar of British soap, an English naval sword, and, as one intrigued visitor noted, “a jar of Coward’s mixed pickles.” There were reference books and picture books, and books that showed he was studying British military methods (including The Principles of Fortification, from the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich). There were Chinese publications from the Shanghai missionaries—who translated scientific material in hopes of convincing the Chinese that their religion had mastered the natural world—as well as the requisite Bibles and Gospel tracts. Then there were the Chinese luxuries, in only slightly better state of repair: golden chopsticks, jade teacups, fans made of silver. Here he entertained his foreign guests with dinners of beefsteak and port, speaking in English and showing off his mastery of knife and fork.7
Among Hong Rengan’s first visitors in Nanjing was a former Southern Baptist preacher named Issachar Roberts, a profoundly unstable missionary from Sumner County, Tennessee, who had been briefly a teacher of Hong Xiuquan (and even more briefly of Hong Rengan) in Canton before the war. Roberts had been the only one to sense the true import of Hong Rengan’s account to Theodore Hamberg back in 1852, though nobody had paid any attention to him at the time. White-haired and angular, he was a singularity within the missionary community, remembered by historians even of his own order as a man of “erratic and peculiar character.”8 The Baptist Board for Foreign Missions in Boston had rejected Roberts’s first application to become a China missionary in 1836 (even the best of his references described his preaching as “not above mediocrity”), and so he had sponsored his own mission to China by donating a piece of land, the income from which was intended to cover all of his expenses.9 On that basis, he had convinced the Baptists to take him on as a missionary free of cost and sailed for China, arriving in 1837. The land later turned out to be nearly worthless, but the Baptists were stuck with him.10 Despite some success in his mission work in southern China, he proved unable to make friends with other missionaries, and his home board was repeatedly alarmed by reports about his 'font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif; color:blue'>11 The Baptists finally severed their ties with him in 1852, after Roberts refused to come to the aid of another missionary who had slit his own throat with a razor.12
But then, in 1853, Hong Xiuquan himself had issued an invitation for Issachar Roberts to come to Nanjing, with a letter that indicated his respect for Roberts’s teachings. The letter gave Roberts a public counterweight to the humiliation of being stripped of his Baptist credentials, though it proved impossible at that time to get through the imperial blockades to Nanjing. Even if he could have gotten through, the U.S. commissioner threatened him with execution if he broke neutrality by visiting the rebels. So he sailed back to the United States, where he traveled about the southern and western states giving speeches in favor of the Taiping cause and raising money to return to China as an independent missionary to the rebels.13 He drummed up a measure of fame, and the papers touted him as “the religious preceptor of [the] Tae-ping King, the chief of the patriotic revolutionary party.”14 After returning to China in 1856 with the money he had raised by his speeches, for four years he still failed to get into rebel territory. But in 1860, with the Shield King announcing a welcome to foreign visitors in Nanjing, his chance came at last and he eagerly made his way to the Taiping capital to rejoin his former students. He arrived in Nanjing on October 13, 1860, just as the British and French troops in the north were invading Beijing, and took up residence in a suite of upstairs rooms in Hong Rengan’s rambling palace.
The Shield King put Roberts to work as an interpreter, giving him responsibility for missionary affairs in the Heavenly Kingdom. However, such service hadn’t been Roberts’s purpose in coming to Nanjing. Roberts believed (or at least so said the Anglican bishop of Hong Kong) that an accident of history had made him the spiritual teacher of a future Chinese emperor.15 He had traveled to Nanjing expecting that the rebels would revere him as the mentor of the Heavenly King. But his reception unraveled differently than he had wished, and it took some time before he could even have a face-to-face audience with Hong Xiuquan. The delay was for reasons of ceremony not so far removed from the kowtow issue behind the warfare then enveloping the Manchu capital; the bevy of secondary kings insisted that if Roberts were to have an audience with the Heavenly King, he would have to kneel before him like the others, to show his subservience. Roberts, the proud American Baptist, refused. They finally allowed him an audience with Hong Xiuquan anyhow, but as he stood uneasily behind the long rows of assembled Taiping officials in their ceremonial robes, Hong Rengan suddenly bellowed at him before the entire hall, “Mr. Roberts, Worship the Heavenly Father!” and down went the white-bearded Roberts, caught off guard and embarrassed, instinctively kneeling down in worship before the man who had once been his student.16
Issachar Roberts lived a ghostly existence in Nanjing, drifting about in the tattered hand-me-down silk robes of Hong Rengan and wearing on his head what one visitor described as “a ridiculous-looking, gilt cardboard tiara, cut into fantastic shapes, and ornamented sometimes with what struck me as badly executed artificial flowers, and sometimes with little figures of tigers.”17 Thinking he would be the teacher, he lived instead in Hong Rengan’s palace as, effectively, an assistant. But for all of his oddities, he became the mouthpiece Hong Rengan needed in Shanghai. In the absence of any direct rebel influence in that city, the foreign residents of Shanghai got most of their information about inland China from the Qing officials and merchants among whom they lived. The officials were de facto loyalists, and the Chinese merchants of Shanghai, who were getting extremely rich due to their carefully cultivated relationships with those same officials, had no interest in a change of government.18 Viewed through their eyes, the Taiping seemed a force of unmitigated destruction. Moreover, the business investments of the foreigners—their ships and docks, their offices, banks, warehouses, and homes—were now located within a sanctuary of imperial control at the edge of a large territory governed by a party with which their own governments wouldn’t allow them to trade. As their business fortunes threatened to falter, they blamed the rebels. Their Qing-loyalist neighbors warned ominously that a Taiping victory would destroy the ports altogether, and there was little evidence to contradict them. Thus, for all who regretted the fighting that summer on moral grounds, there were plenty in the influential foreign merchant community who sided with Frederick Bruce in thinking that the resistance against the Taiping invaders had been both heroic and necessary.
Against that current, Issachar Roberts would spend more than a year in the rebel capital writing letters to the English newspapers in Shanghai and Hong Kong reporting on the true conditions in Nanjing (as he saw them) and giving an ongoing public testament to the revolutionary potential of the Taiping government. His letters glowed. “I can’t help but love the man,” he wrote of Li Xiucheng in one of the first letters, published in Hong Kong’s Overland Register that November. “He is one of a thousand! He is not only a man of learning, affable and amiable, but a king, and a general of no ordinary abilities, commanding more than a hundred thousand troops.” Roberts relayed a message from the Loyal King to the foreign merchants that the rebels (whom Roberts termed the “revolutionists”) in fact did want commerce with them. And given that, why would foreigners trade with the imperials over their fellow Christians? The Taiping, wrote Roberts, “are willing to trade on at least as good if not better terms! They have the means of commerce, teas and silks, within their territory.” The only reason the foreign merchants didn’t already enjoy a flourishing trade with the rebels was that their governments hadn’t yet made a treaty with the Taiping. “Echo responds in England and France,” he wrote, “—Why not make a treaty? Reverberation answers in the United States—Why not make a treaty?…why not make a generous treaty with them at once, giving them their due advantages which they have so worthily won by their sword, and [giving] their people the Christian religion?”19
· · ·
Following shortly on Roberts’s heels, the Welsh missionary Griffith John made his way to the rebel capital in November 1860. His companion from the harrowing journey to Suzhou the previous summer, Joseph Edkins, stayed behind because he wasn’t feeling well (his wife, Jane, thought it was distress brought on by the ghastly apparitions he had seen on the first visit).20 Griffith John was wary of the resentments the rebels might harbor after the attack on them at Shanghai—an attack that personally appalled him. “They came entertaining the most friendly feeling imaginable towards all foreigners,” he wrote in sympathy, “but they were treated by us, and our allies the French, in a way that reflects disgrace on our flag.”21 He nevertheless found himself warmly received in Nanjing when he arrived, and he thrilled at the possibility of setting up a new base of missionary operations right in the capital of the Taiping. He wrote to Edkins, bursting with hope. “He says order, health, peace, and happiness reigned in Nankin,” wrote Jane Edkins, recounting the letter, “and he urges on Mr. Edkins to think again if he will not cast in his lot with the rebels.”22
Unlike Issachar Roberts, Griffith John as yet had no plans to stay for good; his was a scouting mission on behalf of the seventy or so Protestant preachers in Shanghai. And when he returned to the treaty port in early December, he brought them a trophy: an edict from the Heavenly King, written in imperial vermilion ink on yellow satin, welcoming foreign missionaries to take up residence in the Heavenly Kingdom. Here was the missionary community’s most desired concession—one that Britain had just wrung from the Beijing government by force of arms—and the rebels were offering it of their own free will. It seemed a further sign that a divine hand was guiding the Taiping. “I firmly believe,” John wrote to his fellow missionaries, “that God is uprooting idolatry in the land through the insurgents, and that he will, by means of them in connection with the foreign missionary, plant Christianity in its stead.”23
The crucial phrase here was “in connection with the foreign missionary,” for he believed, as did others among the religiously motivated Taiping sympathizers, that the rebels were as yet only the raw material of a Christian China. Hong Rengan, the Shield King, was where the promise lay; not with his elder cousin the Heavenly King (who, Griffith John believed, “writes like a lunatic”). As long as the Taiping followers believed in the divinity of their Heavenly King and as long as they accepted his practice of polygamy (even Hong Rengan, Griffith John discovered, had by this time four wives, insisting that he had to follow his cousin’s custom if he wanted to have influence in the Taiping court)—as long as they held to such beliefs and practices, they were in error and couldn’t be accepted as more than a sort of promising blasphemy; far more promising than the overtly anti-Christian Manchu rulers and Confucian gentry, but still short of the mark.
Moreover, correcting the doctrine of the rebels was, Griffith John believed, more than just an opportunity for the foreign missionaries: it was their moral obligation. As he saw it, the missionaries had caused the rebellion in the first place. It was their Bible and their teachings that had inspired the Heavenly King, and therefore it was their responsibility to make sure that it all came to a good end. As he put it in a pamphlet published a few months later: “Protestant missionaries in China! This Insurrection is your offspring.”24Griffith John yearned for the chance to be the first (other than the erratic Roberts) to help Hong Rengan shape the doctrines of the rebels from their center. But friends in Shanghai prevailed upon him to wait. There was no direct communication between Shanghai and Nanjing yet, they warned him, so his mission would be cut off from the larger community. He would be completely dependent on the rebels for sustenance, and no one yet knew what the state of commerce on the Yangtze River would be or where the course of the war might go. It was dangerous. As an alternative, Joseph Edkins steered him toward Shandong province up the eastern coast, newly opened by Elgin’s treaty, with twenty-nine million souls in need of saving (and the birthplace of Confucius to boot).25
In the end, Griffith John decided to wait at least until spring before deciding whether to set up a permanent mission in Nanjing. But there was no question in his mind where the future of China lay. As he wrote in a letter to the secretary of the London Missionary Society that February, the rebel victories and the Allied invasion of Beijing “have thoroughly undermined Manchu power. It must fall. There is no power to uphold it.” There was nothing but certainty in his voice. “The Manchus,” he wrote, “might as well attempt to blow the sun out of heaven as to quench this flame which their folly and tyranny have kindled.”26
When Joseph Edkins had stayed behind, Griffith John had brought along a different companion to Nanjing. He was Yung Wing, the Chinese graduate of Yale University who had spent most of his life among Westerners in Hong Kong and New England, the same who had reacted with such horror to the programmatic executions of accused rebels in Canton when he first came back to China after college in 1855. He had found work as a tea trader in the interim, but he had political ambitions, and he now traveled to Nanjing with Griffith John “to find out,” in his words, “the character of the Taiping; whether or not they were the men fitted to set up a new government in the place of the Manchu dynasty.”27 Yung Wing’s concerns had less to do with religion and more to do with the ability of the Taiping to rule China in a European or American style. The journey made a favorable impression on him. He noted that the group oddly encountered no challenges from either imperial or rebel forces on their way first to Suzhou (where they found a handful of European and American military personnel and doctors offering their services to the Taiping) and then on to Nanjing. He described the rebels they saw along the way as “generally very civil,” with a “considerate and commendable” attitude toward the peasantry. He noted that it was easy to assign blame for the devastation of the countryside to the Taiping, when in fact the imperial forces were no kinder in their own fields of action. Reaching Nanjing, Yung Wing first met with Issachar Roberts (for whom he had little regard) and then, on November 19, with Hong Rengan, to whom he brought a different kind of message than the missionaries had.28
Yung Wing and Hong Rengan had known each other in Hong Kong back when Hong Rengan was preaching with James Legge, and they shared a certain affinity in that both had been born to poor families in the same part of south China and both had found their lives profoundly changed by the years they spent living in foreign communities in Hong Kong and abroad. Both, also, now sought to use their foreign experience for leverage within China. Hong Rengan received his old acquaintance gladly and expressed hope that Yung Wing might join him in the Taiping movement. Yung Wing initially demurred, saying he had only come to learn more about the rebels, but he did give the Shield King a list of suggestions that he considered to be “the secret of the strength and power of the British government and other European powers.”29 If the Taiping would implement those modernizations, Yung Wing promised, he would pledge himself to their cause. (He did not want for a sense of self-importance.) The suggestions were:
1. To organize an army on scientific principles.
2. To establish a military school for the training of competent military officers.
3. To establish a naval school for a navy.
4. To organize a civil government with able and experienced men to act as advisers in the different departments of administration.
5. To establish a banking system, and to determine on a standard of weights and measures.
6. To establish an educational system of graded schools for the people, making the Bible one of the text books.
7. To organize a system of industrial schools.30
That is: to establish a modern military, American-style (and Christian) schools, and an industrial economy. Hong Rengan readily agreed; indeed, he had already proposed much of this himself in his treatise on government. But as the other kings were occupied elsewhere, he could not immediately promise Yung Wing that the suggestions would be carried out. They had to have a vote, he explained, and the majority would have to agree. So until then the matter of the reforms would have to wait (and after that, presumably, until the Taiping had actually won—for they were policies for an established government, not a warring party contending for power, to put into place).
Nevertheless, Hong Rengan remained hopeful of winning over Yung Wing, who would surely prove useful in attracting American support for the Taiping government. A few days later he sent Yung Wing a Taiping seal and ceremonial robes. Yung Wing declined the robes and seal, insisting that he couldn’t become a Taiping official until he was sure the Taiping would implement his modernizations. But he did prevail upon the Shield King for a passport to allow him to travel freely through Taiping territory, which Hong Rengan granted. Yung Wing didn’t say as much to Hong Rengan, but the reason he wanted the passport was not so he could learn more about the Taiping. Rather, he thought he might be able to make a fortune by purchasing the untouched stocks of tea that lay deep behind the blockades in rebel territory and selling them to the ravenous foreign merchants in Shanghai.31 Yung Wing left Nanjing with Griffith John at the end of November, clutching his passport and his dreams of pristine mountains of tea, and made his way back downriver to Shanghai. Hong Rengan would never see him again.
On December 2, the day after Yung Wing and Griffith John got back from Nanjing, Lord Elgin returned to Shanghai in triumph from his invasion of the north. He was brimming with satisfaction that his mission had been a success; in late October, with the first snows of the long northern winter already settling into the hills west of Beijing, he and Prince Gong had finally ratified the new treaty between China and Great Britain. It included all of the articles Elgin had first negotiated in 1858 when he had broken through the Taku defenses and invaded Tianjin. Among them: the establishment of new treaty ports, opening the Yangtze to British ships, and freedom for missionaries. The treaty also set a high indemnity that China had to pay Britain as punishment for Senggelinqin’s attack onFrederick Bruce’s fleet at Taku in 1859 and for his kidnapping of Harry Parkes and the others in September 1860. The French secured similar concessions.
In the Xianfeng emperor’s eyes, the crucial point of the negotiations all along had been to keep the foreigners out of the capital. “A treaty signed under the city wall was the shame of the ancients,” he told his negotiators. “It doesn’t matter that an indemnity of two million taels would exhaust our treasuries; even if we could pay it, the barbarians are still demanding to enter the capital with a thousand men. Even women and children can see the evil intentions behind their outrageous requests.”32 But the foreign powers now had their right to station ambassadors, and in fact it was the indemnities—which the emperor considered secondary, since they concerned only money—that were the more serious threat to the dynasty. The British had originally demanded 4 million taels of silver, a sum worth about 1.3 million pounds sterling. But after having to fight their way to the gates of Beijing, they doubled the figure to 8 million taels, and Prince Gong had no choice but to grant it. The French demanded the same.
The empire that Xianfeng ruled was already fiscally broken when he came to the throne in 1851. An indemnity left over from the treaty that ended the Opium War in 1842 was compounded by ongoing corruption that saw vast sums leaking invisibly from the imperial coffers (in 1843, 9 million taels simply vanished from the treasury without account). And under Xianfeng’s own rule, the state of affairs had worsened. As rebellions cut off vast regions of the empire and severed the Grand Canal, the imperial government lost much of the land-tax revenues that normally made up four-fifths of its income. Insurrections among miners in the south cut off the capital’s supply of precious metals. Bandit armies in the northern plains disrupted the production of salt, a valuable government monopoly. By the time Prince Gong agreed to pay the British and French their indemnities totaling 16 million taels, the sum amounted to roughly eighty times the amount of silver that actually remained in the imperial treasury.33Paradoxically, the only meaningful source of revenue with which to pay the indemnity was the customs duty from foreign trade at Shanghai and Canton, meaning that the state of British and French trade in China became inextricably tied to the Qing government’s ability to pay its new debt (and therefore the ability of Britain and France to receive it).
In Shanghai, Elgin learned firsthand about his brother’s defense of the city from the rebels during his absence in the north. The irony was hardly lost on the British (save, perhaps, for Frederick Bruce) that they had gone to war against China’s imperial government in the north at exactly the same time they were opening hostilities against its enemies, the Taiping rebels, at Shanghai. Lord Russell, the foreign secretary in London, learned about the surrender of the Taku forts and the attack on the Taiping at Shanghai on exactly the same day.34 A bemused editorial in the London Times chalked it up to the oddness of China. “Generally speaking,” it read, “when the population of a country is split into two factions, an invading force would be disposed to coalesce with one of them; but the politics of China resemble the zoology of Australia, and exhibit an inversion of all ordinary rules.”35 By way of explanation, one rather game British officer in Shanghai told his American counterpart, “My dear fellow, we always pitch into the swells. At the north the Imperialists are the swells, but down here, by Jove! the Rebels are, don’t you know?—so we pitch into them both.”36 However, what seemed like good sport to some was to others a grievous miscalculation. The New York Times saw the Taiping rebels as natural allies of the foreign powers, for “all labor to the same end—the revivification of China by the humiliation, and if practicable the displacement of the actual bigoted and exclusive regime.”37 The Overland Register in Hong Kong charged that “a gross and unmitigated error has been committed at Shanghai,” and declared that Britain should support the rebels because “in the political creed of the insurgent leaders there appears, from beginning to end, a complete revolution of the Chinese ideas in every important particular, and there is not an item of it that should not be met with the warm sympathy of every man who cares for the welfare of any country besides his own.”38
No one expected further conflict, however. Now that the treaty was signed, Britain appeared to be at peace with the Qing government, and it was obvious from the Loyal King’s letter in August that the Taiping maintained no hostility toward Shanghai. So the invasion force that had at its peak accounted for more than twenty thousand British and French troops in China was disbanded and sent home. By the end of December, half of the British forces had already returned to India and England (sparking rumors in China that the British were leaving because back home someone was attacking their own country).39 Of the remaining British forces, most were stationed in the colony of Hong Kong, while roughly four thousand garrisoned Tianjin and Taku in the north—within striking distance of Beijing—to guarantee steady payments on the indemnity. Even then, there were grumblings that the high cost of maintaining this force in north China used up whatever payments it secured from the Qing government. As for Shanghai, by the end of 1860 there were only 1,200 British soldiers left in the city, and Elgin thought even that many would be unneeded.40
Elgin spent a month in the British settlement before leaving China for good. His work in the north was completed, and his final goal before returning home was to gauge the possibility of British relations with the rebels, who controlled most of the riverway that was now, thanks to his treaty, officially open to British trade. He gave no sign of pleasure about his brother Frederick Bruce’s “defense” of Shanghai from Taiping attackers the previous summer and expressed overt dismay at seeing the charred remnants of the city’s suburbs. He also heard a rumor—which was current in both the foreign and Chinese communities—that when the French had burned those neighborhoods on the excuse of protecting the city from the rebels, they had done so mainly because they wanted the land for themselves, to build a church.41 “The French have some method in their madness,” Elgin quipped in his journal. “[T]hey insist on having it now at the cost of the land, ‘as there are no houses upon it.’ ”42
Though Frederick Bruce held obstinately to his negative view of the rebels, Lord Elgin counseled him to keep an open mind. In a private letter to his brother (who by this time was the ambassador, wintering in Tianjin and awaiting the preparation of his quarters in Beijing), Elgin told Bruce that between the imperials and the Taiping, “bad as they both are,” he believed the rebels to have the brighter future. From what he had seen of the regions under Taiping control—of which Bruce had seen none—Elgin felt that the rebels exhibited “honesty and power.”43 And in what may have been a rebuke for Bruce’s refusal to read the Loyal King’s letter prior to the Taiping arrival at Shanghai, Elgin warned his brother not to accede to any Qing requests for Britain to avoid contact with the rebels: “it will never do to come under any obligation not to communicate with them on the Yangtze,” he wrote. “It would be wrong in principle … and impossible in practice.”
Winter had arrived, and there wasn’t time to make another trip up the Yangtze himself, but Elgin left orders with the commander in chief of British naval forces in China, Rear Admiral James Hope, to pay a visit to the Taiping at their capital come spring and to find out if there might be a basis for a friendly relationship between Britain and the rebels. It was a delicate situation, Elgin admitted, for the British held treaty relations with the Taiping’s enemy. But he hoped that strict neutrality would allow Britain to benefit from interaction with both sides even as the Chinese war ground on. “I rather think better of the rebel prospects since I came here,” he wrote in a private letter to Hope, “at any rate it is clear that we must not become partisans in this civil war.”44
Having settled the war with the Manchus and now having set the wheels into motion for Admiral Hope to open relations with the Taiping, Lord Elgin’s mission was complete and he sailed home at last. It would be a long voyage, but that was just as well; for even as he stopped off at Hong Kong on his way out of China, he began to get wind that the conduct of his army in Beijing was not being met with approval back in England. When he finally got home, there would be much to answer for.
Meanwhile, the Taiping military consolidation of China’s wealthy eastern province of Jiangsu continued apace. As early as September 1860, an imperial supporter in the region noted that the rebels controlled every county around Shanghai except for those under the direct protection of foreigners, which still held out (“for the time being,” he fretted, “though who knows what’s coming?”). Like many Qing loyalists, this observer was despondent. “How can we possibly encourage the hearts of the people?” he wrote in his diary. “How can we restore our territory? My generation lives through this crisis, but we have nowhere to set our foot [to take action], and our voices can do no more than sigh.”45 The Taiping capitalized on such despondence, spreading broadsides to shake the will of those who hoped for the return of Manchu control. “The emperor of the Qing is the emperor of a lost country,” read one proclamation in the city of Wujiang near Suzhou, “and his ministers are all the ministers of a lost country.”46 When the news of the emperor’s flight from Beijing came down through the channels of rumor, it shook even the staunch loyalists to their core and forced them to confront the likelihood of a Qing collapse. “A ruling house of two hundred years, endangered in an instant,” wrote the observer in his diary. “I never imagined the end would come so soon.”47
The Taiping extended their control through the prosperous lower reaches of the Yangtze River, the region known as Jiangnan (literally, “South of the River”) that encompassed the confluence of Jiangsu, Anhui, and Zhejiang provinces. In Jiangsu province, home to Shanghai, the Taiping held the capital, Suzhou, along with the major cities of Danyang and Wuxi. Zhenjiang, the river city of ghosts, held out but the countryside surrounding it was all under the control of the Taiping. In Anhui they held the capital city, Anqing, though Zeng Guofan had just established his presence nearby. South of Shanghai lay Zhejiang province, where the wealthy trading city of Ningbo and the capital, Hangzhou, were in imperial hands for the time being. Li Xiucheng had attacked Hangzhou as his feinting maneuver during the relief of the Nanjing siege and unleashed hell within it, but he had not broken through to the Manchu garrison city, nor had he left troops to hold the city after darting back to Nanjing.
Taiping armies arriving in Jiangnan were met with a mixture of fascination and fear. One witness in Changshu county, about sixty miles west of Shanghai, described the parade of a rebel army through his town in the autumn of 1860. Curious townsfolk peered out from behind their gates as the Taiping officers passed, resplendent in their bright, colorful silks. They wore jackets of fox fur and capes of squirrel hide and rode slowly past on a succession of several hundred horses, as men with banners and spears lined the road. He estimated that 10,000 Taiping soldiers passed through altogether, and noted that they caused no harm at all to the townspeople. But then, after the bulk of the army had passed, came the devils who followed in their wake: a few hundred longhairs trailing behind the procession who went freely back and forth between people’s houses, knocking on the (now-locked) gates. They broke into houses to commit robbery, rape, and murder. They grabbed young men and tied them together by their long braids, dragging them off in the direction in which the army had gone. The terrified witness thought it fortunate they didn’t burn down the town as well. As the proud army faded away on the road to the south and the cloud of devils drifted after it into the distance, many of the townspeople left their homes to follow them. Some went in search of relatives who had been hauled off. Others hurried along to catch up to the army, to sell food to the Taiping troops. Others just wandered listlessly along the road, picking their way through the piles of debris and garbage left behind by the passing march to see if there was anything worth keeping.48
It was the fringe parties that were the worst, and the terror caused by those who followed behind the armies on the march paled in comparison to the ones who went in advance of the victorious siege armies, those who first entered the cities broken after weeks or months of resistance and who then fanned through the undefended countryside like a nightmare. Ragged and unkempt, completely out of control of the generals who would follow a day or two later when the cities were secure, these men committed atrocities that nearly justified the thousands of suicides that preceded their arrival. One witness in Zhejiang province’s Xiangshan county described the rape of a new bride by dozens of those men, who disemboweled her groom—their primary target, because he had a shaved forehead in the Qing style—and left both of them for dead.49 Another in the same province reported, “There were those who would cut open the stomach and drink the blood, and others who chopped off the four limbs. Some would dig out the heart and eat it … my pen cannot bear to write this.”50 They carried off women. They carried off young boys as conscripts and trained them to kill. If the Qing officials had already fled the city, another person reported, the vanguard troops would just murder a few cowering citizens and dress their corpses up in the clothes left behind by the imperial ministers, to invigorate the army that followed behind them.51
The pattern, such as it was, was this: where the generals resided, there was relative order. Soldiers who violated the Heavenly Army’s strict rules of discipline were punished swiftly and mercilessly; heads hung on stakes, with placards nailed to them warning would-be rapists and looters. But at the fringes, where smaller groups of Taiping soldiers moved among larger civilian populations, control became tenuous. At the cusp of conquest, depravity could be unleashed as cities fell and imperial defenses crumbled. The violence of the conquering Taiping and the defeated imperialists was often impossible to distinguish. But once control was established and there was no threat of imperial reinvasion, things became quiet. Taxes were collected. Crops were grown. New officials were appointed. Decrees were promulgated and sometimes rescinded. Hair grew long on top in the rebel fashion. Queues usually weren’t cut off (a welcome convenience, should the imperials reappear). Life went on.
In such areas of quiet control, a detachment of two or three “longhairs” arriving unexpectedly in a rural village under remote Taiping rule might occasion dread in the local population, the locking of gates. But as often as not they paid for the food they ate. And those same rebels might themselves travel in fear of being waylaid in the darkness, even knowing that such attacks would bring reprisal from garrison forces stationed in a city just a day or two’s march away. The rumor of an approaching imperial force could bring relief to gentry who wanted their old lives back, but it meant terror for the peasants, to whom it signaled the return of chaos. For if there was anything consistent in the reports of foreigners and literate Chinese elites on the will of the peasantry of China through this war, it was that they didn’t care at all who was in charge; they simply wanted the fighting to end. They wanted order. Rarely did anything good come of the fighting, no matter whose side you were on.
The rules for the general population under Taiping rule were usually clear, if at times impossibly strict. Early in the war, a decree went out forbidding women in Hubei, Anqing, Nanjing, and Yangzhou to practice foot binding. (Foot binding, the forcible constriction of girls’ feet to keep them about six inches long through their adult life, was a Chinese fashion that the Hakkas who founded the Taiping didn’t themselves practice; they also opposed it on religious grounds.) The stated punishment for a woman who kept her feet bound was to have them cut off.52 Though such uncompromising laws may have kept discipline in the military ranks, they were useless against popular customs, where enforcement would mean maiming a significant percentage of the female population. (The Manchus, it is worth pointing out, had also tried and failed to prohibit foot binding when they came to power in China.) A scholar living under Taiping control in Zhejiang’s Shaoxing county in 1861 wrote that a rebel general had just given orders mandating decapitation for any man caught shaving the top of his head in the style of a Qing subject, anyone who smoked opium, or anyone who worshipped “demon” idols, especially Buddhist ones. Of all the proscriptions, it was the ban on opium that really dumbfounded the scholar. “Everyone under my dynasty smokes opium, from the wealthiest gentry all the way down to the servants and vegetable sellers in the market,” he wrote in amazement. “Even the rebels themselves are deeply addicted to it, so how can they go around talking about cutting off heads?”53 To Chinese and foreigners alike, the suppression of opium was both the best-known and apparently least effective of the Taiping government’s social improvement campaigns.
Faced with so much new territory and an enormous rural population, in some cases the Taiping simply established agreements with existing local strongmen or gentry who were willing to collaborate, giving them autonomy over their immediate area in exchange for tax collection and an implicit agreement not to abet imperial forces in retaking the territory.54 More often, though, they appointed a xiangguan, or local official, to take charge of collecting taxes and rounding up necessary supplies (bricks, wood, labor for public works), as well as keeping track of the local population. The opportunity for service under the Taiping redistributed power to a certain degree in the countryside, insofar as the Qing had relied exclusively on wealthy landowners and successful scholars to keep local control. There were indeed plenty of former Qing officials and degree holders who made the transition to Taiping rule and became xiangguan in the new system. But at the same time, there were also many who would never have held such a position in the old society. The surviving rosters of the xiangguan list people with a range of backgrounds, including farmers and secretaries, tradesmen, and old men important only in their villages. There were silk weavers and monks, tofu sellers, and martial arts instructors. One county near Suzhou had a xiangguan whose profession was listed simply as “gambler.”55 Below these new officials, the Taiping also recruited talented locals to help staff the xiangguan’s offices, hunting especially for experts in geography, military tactics, medicine, mathematics, local customs, and astrological fortune-telling.56
Central as the Taiping religion was to Hong Rengan’s appeal for foreign support, its attractiveness to the rebels’ Chinese followers and subjects in the Jiangnan region of eastern China was questionable at best. Even their enemies distinguished between the “true longhairs” (the original faithful from Guangxi and Guangdong provinces in the south) and the multitudes who had entered the rebel movement later.57 Though the Taiping visions of salvation and apocalypse may have motivated some, the rebels’ appeal also rested heavily on more earthly issues of control, stability, and taxation (essential to the poorer classes) and, for those in more elite levels of society, the promise of an empire that would be ruled by Chinese rather than by Manchus.
Separately from his attempts to forge a religious bond with the international community in Shanghai, Hong Rengan also labored from within his palace to design a new government for the time when the Taiping would finally defeat the Manchus and rule China. In the 1850s, when Taiping leaders had tried to institute widespread land redistribution and enforce puritanical religious practices, they had failed; there was simply too much resistance from subjects who preferred to live their lives in an approximation of what they had been before. But with Hong Rengan’s arrival, the policies became more accommodating as he sought compromises between the religious ideology of his visionary cousin and the institutions that had worked for so much of China’s past. Which is to say that the government Hong Rengan envisioned for China was not—at least in the small, preparatory scale that it took in his offices—a revolutionary one.
For one thing, Hong Rengan established a replica of the imperial government, with duties divided among the same six boards (finance, civil affairs, war, public works, rituals, and punishments) that formed the skeleton of the imperial bureaucracy in Beijing.58The Manchus, back in the 1600s prior to their conquest of China, had done the same thing, building a replica shadow government that matched the one in the Ming dynasty’s capital, and it had proved an essential factor in their acceptance upon entering Beijing—for it contained the implicit promise that whatever they brought to their rule, they would not change the fundamental structures of the government bureaucracy. Hong Rengan’s version of the six boards was as yet barely staffed and limited to a handful of rooms within his own palace in Nanjing (just downstairs from Issachar Roberts’s quarters, in fact), but it nevertheless reflected a similar intent.
Then there was the examination system. The entire story of the Taiping Rebellion might be told, from one perspective, as the rage of a failed exam candidate writ large. But the rebel government in Nanjing nevertheless accepted that the existing examination system was an extremely effective mechanism for selecting loyal officials and that the educated of China looked forward to competing in it. And so, in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom as under the Qing, talent was determined by examination—only now based on theBible, not the Confucian classics. Loyalist scholars living under Taiping conquest tended to scoff at the Christian content of the Taiping examinations; one scholar near Suzhou who had to write on the topic “Paying tribute to the Heavenly Father” expressed bemusement that the Taiping meant something new by the Chinese character for “Heaven.” Handing in his paper, he whispered to his examiner, “How can the Heaven I wrote about today somehow be different from the Heaven that used to be?” The examiner smiled silently and then ripped up the man’s completed essay.59 Others refused outright to take the exams at all and labeled those who took them as shameless (a response that echoed loyalists of the Ming who had scoffed when the Manchus began offeringtheirexaminations back in the 1640s). But avoidance of the Taiping examinations by Qing loyalists did create opportunities for others, and the new competitions turned out to be far less cutthroat than the old ones. On the district-level exams given near Suzhou in April 1861, for each group of one hundred youths who took the exam, forty or fifty passed. On the Qing exams, perhaps one of them would have. The delighted students received cash prizes along with their new degrees and the right to go on to the province-level exam in Suzhou and the national exam in Nanjing.60
Hong Rengan took charge of the Taiping examinations soon after his arrival in the capital, and he began to make changes to them. Some changes were minor (for example, he altered the names of the degrees ever so slightly). But some were far more significant. Because the original Taiping examinations covered only the Bible, many in China believed that the rebels had simply replaced Confucius with Jesus Christ. Zeng Guofan used precisely that claim in his appeal for support for his army in 1854, calling the war on the Taiping a war to save Confucian civilization. However, one remarkable sign of Hong Rengan’s influence in Nanjing was that by early 1861 the Taiping examinations under his direction had begun to incorporate the Chinese classics as well. Under Hong Rengan, Confucius would have his place in the Heavenly Kingdom.
Thus, students sitting for the district exam in the spring of 1861 had to write essays not only on religious doctrine but also on the Analects, the book of Confucius’s sayings. The full text of the examination is lost, but the essay prompt is recorded in various diaries; the allusion chosen was one with a particularly chilling resonance for the Taiping project of creating a new state from the ashes of war. In the passage selected, a disciple asked Confucius what the three most important pillars of a state were. Confucius replied that the state must have military power, it must provide food for its people to eat, and its people must have faith in their government. “But what if you can’t have all three?” the disciple asked. “Then do away with the military,” said Confucius. The disciple continued, asking what if the ruler had to give up one more thing. “In that case, do without food,” Confucius told him. “There has always been death, but without faith there can be no state.”61
Hong Rengan took the lead in writing and publishing Taiping political propaganda, which he printed in bulk on a Western lead-type press housed in his palace. Some of the publications echoed his belief in industrialization: the importance of railroads, mechanical weapons, steamships, and telegraphs, and the need for a national newspaper.62 The press itself (originally built in Canton) was such an innovation, and his crew of printers readily mastered the foreign technology of movable type. The members of his staff were some of the most highly educated men in the rebel capital, men who, one visitor noted, were among the least religiously zealous in the city; one even confided to the visitor that he didn’t believe in Hong Xiuquan’s visions.63 Fittingly, the publications that emanated from that office contained not just the de rigueur religious propaganda based on the Heavenly King’s visions but also a strong current of more secular appeals to sway those who had no interest in theology. In those documents, which were the dominant rebel propaganda of the war’s final years, the civil war appeared less a struggle between religions than a war between races—a war of historical resentment and genocidal revenge pitting the Chinese against the Manchus.
One such publication, entitled A Hero’s Return to the Truth, told the story of a high-ranking Chinese official of the Qing dynasty who had defected to the rebel side. It was written as a narrative, recounting the man’s conversations with the Shield King, who corrected his misconceptions about Taiping belief. It was, above all, an ethnic appeal for support, directed at the elites who held power under the Qing dynasty. The protagonist was Chinese, but his family had long served in high-ranking positions under the Manchu dynasty. “In both flesh and blood I am a man of China proper,” he declared. He had abandoned his service with the dynasty because it was crumbling and now went over to the Taiping because he was beginning to realize that although his family of officials had long considered themselves powerful under the Qing, in fact they were nothing more than slaves to the Manchus who controlled their country. Hong Rengan welcomed him and related a conversation with his cousin in which Hong Xiuquan had said, “For a land as extensive as the eighteen provinces to be under the yoke of the three provinces of the Manchu dogs, and for five hundred million Chinese to be subject to a few million Tartar devils is indeed sufficient cause for extreme shame and disgrace.” The official realized that the Taiping were in fact the saviors of the Chinese people from the Manchus. Hong Rengan’s words were “like a sudden thunderbolt breaking in my ear,” he said, “awakening me for the first time from my idiotic dreams.”64
According to this tract, the Taiping were not at all revolutionary. In fact, they were native traditionalists, continuing the legacy of all past Chinese resistance to outside conquest. Hong Rengan drew parallels between the Taiping and the loyal Chinese of the Ming dynasty, as well as the earlier Song dynasty, which had been conquered by northern ancestors of the Manchus. As so many Chinese had given their lives in the past to try to hold off the invasion of China by outsiders, so would the Taiping lead the Chinese to break though the illusion that the Manchus were their proper rulers. He even invoked the five great scholars of the Song dynasty—Zhu Xi, Zhang Zai, Zhou Dunyi, and the brothers Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi—who had founded the school of Neo-Confucian philosophy that was so dear to Zeng Guofan. Their system of belief was at the very core of the civilization Zeng Guofan had staked his life on defending, but in Hong Rengan’s hands, they became a reminder of why the Chinese must revolt against the Manchus. Great scholars like those, he pointed out, arose only during Chinese dynasties such as the Song and the Ming. Under conquest dynasties such as the Qing, when the Chinese were enslaved, their civilization weakened and festered. Again, the official said, he was shocked into awareness by Hong Rengan’s words. “They are as cold water showering on the head,” he told Hong Rengan, “and hot charcoal burning at the heart.”65
Against the accusation that the Taiping wanted to destroy Confucian civilization, Hong Rengan explained patiently to the official in Hero’s Return that it was only idolatry the Taiping wanted to get rid of. The books of Confucius were welcome, and his philosophy was still central to the Taiping vision of society; it was just that the Chinese had been corrupted into worshipping the sage as a false god in the Confucian temples, and those must be destroyed. Chinese scholars, he wrote, should “observe the benevolence, righteousness, and moral principles of Confucius and Mencius,” but that did not mean they should “worship [them] with sacrifices.” Wisdom, knowledge, and success were granted by Heaven, Hong Rengan explained, not by mortals. “How could the now-dead sages bestow fame or wisdom upon man?” Confucius and Mencius should be read and respected, but they should not be confused with God.
Hong Rengan thus put forward an appeal for support that rested not on religion alone but on harmony between the Taiping’s religious beliefs and the longer history of China. It was another framework to compete with Zeng Guofan’s—not Confucianism versusChristianity but Chinese versus Manchu. The central issue of the war, as Hong Rengan framed it, was the liberation of the Chinese people. It was a powerful appeal, and it targeted the exact same audience of wealthy gentry and educated scholars whom Zeng Guofan depended upon for his support. Along with his efforts to design a government that could inherit the existing bureaucracy and his attempt to widen the appeal of the Taiping examinations by including the Confucian texts on them, Hong Rengan’s vision was one of stable transition, of endurance, of preservation. But despite the breadth of his efforts and the talents of his staff, Hong Rengan felt outnumbered at court. He had the faith of his cousin, which elevated him above all the others, but his fellow kings occasionally frustrated him. The ones who had been there from the beginning considered themselves “the heroic founders of the state,” he complained. They were less concerned with the future, less concerned with how to win over the population or unify their government. “They only looked out for themselves,” he wrote, “and didn’t think about the big picture.”66
Real control still lay just outside the rebels’ grasp. Weakened as the imperial government in Beijing was after the Allied invasion and the flight of the emperor, it still clung to the Mandate of Heaven by mere virtue of its existence, and as long as it did, its loyalists would fight for it to the end. The siege that Zeng Guofan had laid at Anqing up the river in Anhui province that fall, which he had managed to hold so steadily through the Taiping conquest of Jiangnan and the invasion of the capital by the Europeans, had by wintertime grown into a pressing source of concern to the Taiping downriver in their capital. For it was their choke point too. Their base in Anqing was the buffer that protected Nanjing from any advance from the north or west on the rebel capital, and failure to control the full length of the Yangtze would complicate the final stages of the strategy Hong Rengan and Li Xiucheng had agreed upon, namely, to consolidate the fertile southern provinces, rebuild the heartland of the old Ming Empire, and then starve the dry Manchu domains of the north into extinction.
By the late autumn of 1860, Li Xiucheng had to leave off his conquest of the eastern provinces to help relieve Anqing’s garrison forces. The Heavenly King had actually ordered him to go north—most likely to strike at the weakened Manchu capital—but he refused, even as Zeng Guofan had refused his own emperor’s direction when he thought he knew better. Instead, the Loyal King insisted that he had to take his men westward into Jiangxi and Hubei provinces, where a host of local leaders had pledged several hundred thousand followers to join the Taiping ranks.67 Those expected recruits lay just on the other side of the Anqing siege. Leaving Nanjing in November, Li Xiucheng took his army on a roughly westward march down along the winding southern bank of the Yangtze, below which eventually lay Zeng Guofan’s camp at Qimen.
Li Xiucheng’s parting words to those who remained in the capital were stern instructions that they should begin stockpiling food. The Taiping now had control of the downward stretches of the Yangtze as far as Shanghai and so should fear no attacks from the east, he reassured them—but the next attack might come from upstream. “If Anqing can be held, there is no need to worry,” he predicted, “but if it is not firm, the capital will not be secure.”68Jade and silver would be useless if the war encroached further on Nanjing; they needed grain.
By early February 1861, even Hong Rengan had taken to the field at the Heavenly King’s orders, leaving behind his palace and printing press and massing an army of his own to help in the coordinated relief of Anqing from the maddeningly entrenched Hunan forces. He had never commanded an army before—nor, for that matter, even fought in one (save for his brief enlistment in an imperial unit while trying to get to Nanjing). But he was the Shield King, and his followers, at least, had faith in him. A visitor from theLondon Missionary Society named William Muirhead was on hand to witness the pomp and circumstance of Hong Rengan’s departure from Nanjing on the auspicious first day of the Chinese New Year.69 It was the beginning of year 11 on the calendar of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Hong Rengan sat calmly atop his throne, crowned in gold, his small person swallowed up in the luminous yellow silk robes that enfolded him. An assembled crowd of Taiping officers knelt down before his throne and sang in unison, “May the Shield King live a thousand years, a thousand years, a thousand times a thousand years!” Then Muirhead watched as the round-faced man who had once been his old friend James Legge’s deferential assistant in Hong Kong stepped solemnly down from the throne and into a grand palanquin, borne by eight strong men, that carried him off to the war.
The words that rang in Muirhead’s ears afterward were not the words of the song, however. They were the words Hong Rengan had spoken to him earlier, before the ceremony, when the two men had spoken privately about the dangers that lay ahead and Hong Rengan let slip a glint of the uncertainty (or was it fear?) that was lurking behind his placid demeanor. “Mr. Muirhead,” he said then, “pray for me.”70